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Amodern 8: Translation–Machination January 2018

T R A N S L AT I O N A N D O P T I C A L M E D I ASpirit-Channeling in Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Karin Littau

Arguably, there have been three major media transitions that altered how the written word wasproduced and consumed in the West. Historians of the book have demonstrated that transitionsfrom scroll to codex, codex to print, and print to “networked and programmable media,” haveeach in their own way transformed writing and reading. [1] With these transitions there alsocame new aesthetic practices. Print technology, for instance, had a fundamental impact on thephenomenon of the novel, and its fortunes as a literary genre are closely tied to materialchanges in modern book production in the eighteenth century. [2] In our current age, the so-called born-digital literatures, while refashioning important aspects of the medium of the bookand film, are putting into practice new textualities and poetics, including of translation.[3] Conversely, these same digital media have prompted a rethinking of print repertoires, asevidenced by literary works that play with the multimodal possibilities of digital technologies inthe “old” medium of the book, such as Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), which is as much an exercisein poetry translation as in media translation. [4] Such interplays demonstrate how old and newmedia perpetually remediate each other, a point that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusinderived from Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is alwaysanother medium.” [5]

If media play a constitutive role in shaping literary output – that is, transform the matter, formand content of literary writing – might this not also be the case with regard to literarytranslation? It is evident that the computer generally, and machine translation specifically, haveengendered new kinds of “translation-arts.” [6] But what impact have older screen-basedtechnologies had on literary translation? I am thinking here not only of film, but also itsprecursor media. Although historians of the book and reading have paid some attention to themedia transitions that occurred when animated and projected images first began to rival theprint medium, the implications of the shift from print to screen cultures seem to feature moreprominently in media and film history. [7] For instance, with the arrival of cinema, critics fearedthat motion picture technology was a threat to the continued existence of literature and wouldlead to the demise of reading culture, [8] while others sought to bring outmoded readingpractices into line with modern film-viewing. [9] Crucially also, as recent research in Victorianand Modernist visual studies has suggested, film and its precursor media gave rise to a host ofnew literary forms of expression, frequently referred to as proto-cinematic literature. [10]

Drawing on such studies, this essay gives a snapshot of the mid-Victorian period to address theways in which Edward FitzGerald, wittingly or unwittingly, co-opted optical media into histranslational practice and theory. His stance on translation – like that of his contemporaryDante Gabriel Rossetti – while imbued with older cultural beliefs and practices, such as thetransmigration of spirits and souls, is also strikingly contemporary when it comes to one of thekey media technologies of his age: the magic lantern. My focus on these little noticedconnections between translation and optical media is intended as a step towards a more

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comprehensive media history of translation that pays attention to translation not only in thefamiliar contexts of oral and written cultures, but also in visual and screen cultures.

Metaphors of Mind and of Translation

As Friedrich Kittler has shown in Optical Media, there is a “historical tendency to employtechnical media as models or metaphors for imagining the human or the soul.” [11] This isevident in the ways in which mind has variously been described as a wax tablet (Plato), blanksheet of paper (Locke), palimpsest (de Quincey), or camera obscura (Leibniz). [12] From the lateeighteenth and right through the nineteenth century, as optical media proliferate, references inliterature and philosophy to Hirngespenster (Kant’s “brain phantoms”), mind as magic lantern(Schopenhauer), kaleidoscope (Butterworth) or phantasmagoria (Yeats) appear and disappearlike the ghostly apparitions themselves, and in direct proportion to these media’s popularity.[13] Sometimes even dead media resurrect, as in a novella from 1952 that features the zoetropeas a metaphor for mind. [14] The twentieth century updates mind in tandem with its ownLeitmedia: mind as photographic apparatus (Freud), cinema (Andreas-Salomé), and computercircuit (Turkle). [15] These shifts suggest, first, that cognitive functions such as thought andmemory are successively remodeled in accordance with historically specific media and, second,that as technologies multiply, so do our models for understanding mind.

Translation, too, has been subject to a host of metaphorical regimes. In Western discoursesmany of these, unsurprisingly, adhere to the term’s Latinate roots in transferre and focusaccordingly on the species of transition translation is. Apart from spatial metaphors thatforeground carryings across, organic ones that emphasize flowering, or corporeal metaphorsthat compare translation to a corpse, a carcass or a reborn body, there is also a metaphor-setthat highlights mediality. [16] One such group, rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition, includesoral metaphors that stress “utterance” and “acts of speech,” drawing as they do on the myth ofBabel as a story of the multiplicity of tongues. [17] Such metaphors hark back to an oral culture,whereas scriptural metaphors that cast translation as a form of “rewriting” belong to achirographic and typographic culture. [18] Among this array of medial metaphors are also thosethat foreground an ocular or optical dimensions. While not immediately or obviously related towhat a translation is or how it presents itself, they nevertheless reveal important facets oftranslation’s history and materiality. These are chiefly metaphors that have to do with visionand visibility: window, glass, mirror, portrait, photograph, lamp, and cinematography.

Translation is regarded as a “pane of glass” [19] that is transparent and seemingly unmediated,“in a glass” [20] or as a “mirror” [21] that reflects and thus verifies even as it inverses theoriginal, as a “portrait-painting” [22] that produces either an idealized copy or a distortedlikeness, a “daguerreotype” with “a certain sti! […] fidelity,” [23] or a “photograph” thatmerely replicates a two-dimensional image. [24] Some images foreground visual perspective,evocative of eighteenth-century practices of painting as in “taking a view,” or cinematographyas in “zooming.” [25] Others stress gradations of light and shade: negatively, when translation isregarded as the “shadow” of a sparkling original, subdued “candlelight” as opposed to bright“sunlight,” or conversely as illumination or the means by which to bring something forgottenor hidden to light. [26] These metaphors are linked not only with particular scopic regimes but



















also with specific media that variously frame, reflect, project, refract, or di!ract. Translation isfiltered, as it were, through media that let in light, disperse it, throw shadows, and/or createillusions. As one might expect in the Victorian period, receptive as it was towards spiritualism,and from a translator who regularly partook in séances, [27] Rossetti’s medial metaphor turnsinto a “mediumistic” one, [28] when he compares the translator’s task to Aladdin’s search for amagic lamp, thus bringing together translation, technology, and the supernatural. [29] Theconnection with the supernatural in “mediumistic” metaphors ranges from translation asspirit-channeling as advocated by FitzGerald and also by Ezra Pound, [30] to the translator as a“ghost” inhabiting two worlds “but belonging fully to neither.” [31] Here, mediums and mediaare, as it were, kindred spirits. [32]

Metaphors tell us a great deal about the ways in which translation has been perceived andunderstood, just as their historicity tells us of changes and shifts in those understandings andperceptions. Francis William Newman’s 1856 remediated metaphor for translation is a case inpoint, not least because it grasps the impact of photographic technology on the fine arts: “weneed a translation executed on the principles rather of a daguerreotypist, than a fashionableportrait-painter.” [33] The shift from the artisanal to the mass-produced, entailed by thisstatement, not only implies that translation should be addressed to the “unlearned public”rather than the select scholar (which is entirely in keeping with Newman’s democratic, anti-elitist impulses and stated aims elsewhere in his work), but suggests additionally that readers begiven a naturalistic representation to enable them to judge the work for themselves, unmediatedby the flourishes a “painter” might add. [34] Medial metaphors thus disclose the shaping of self-consciousness by those very media that mediate it, and in which the history of its self-recognition – the mediology of spirit – is recorded. They also reinforce Kittler’s claim as to therole that technical media play in shaping the workings of mind and memory, or indeed the fruitsof mind’s labors – one of which is translation.

“Media determine [the translator’s] situation”

The idea that media technologies are internalized by the mind, or as Walter Ong puts it, havebeen “interiorized, incorporated into mental processes themselves,” [35] and so shape howthinking itself thinks of thinking, and how thinking thinks about the human brain, presents aserious challenge to humanism and its tendency to put the human at the center of all things. Inmedia-philosophical terms this is best encapsulated by Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation abouthis typewriter: “Our writing instruments also work on our thoughts.” [36] This dictum, re-emphasized by Kittler, suggests that our instruments or tools are not merely technical support,but have the power to “enframe,” altering the character of what is thus enframed. [37] Here, it isnot Geist (spirit, soul, higher consciousness) but instruments, tools, and “media,” as Kittlerfamously puts it, that “determine our situation.” [38] In other words, we cannot think without oroutside of media technologies; they environ thought and mediate it accordingly. This is why theyshape cultural practices like writing, reading, translating etc.

The simple idea that media set the framework not only for the ways in which we write, ortranslate, but also shape the matter, form and content of this writing, becomes a complexhistory when we consider how and in what ways media transitions e!ect changes in the self-conception and practices of writing and translating. Elsewhere I have addressed the constitutive















role that technologies have played in the history of Western translation in the media contexts oforal, scribal, and print cultures, largely drawing on insights from book history. I showed howtranslation changed over the course of history in accordance with the material and technicalresources at its disposal. [39] A related line of enquiry concerns the e!ects on translation of thepredominantly visual mediascape that emerged rapidly in the nineteenth century, is mostreadily associated with cinema at the turn of the twentieth century, and remains active with thecomputer screen at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Thomas Elsaesser’s point that cinema has become “part of us” and that “there is no longer anoutside to the inside” because “cinema [is] in our heads,” entails that cinema shapes not onlyminds or “mindsets” but also forms of cultural expression other than film. [40] The self-conscious borrowings of filmic techniques, especially montage, in works by John Dos Passos andAlfred Döblin bear this out; as do the parallel, converging interests of literary modernism andcinema in T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. [41] That film inspired, even invigorated, literarypractice is also evident in the postmodern appropriations by fiction writers Thomas Pynchon,Angela Carter, and others, of qualities so readily associated with cinema, such as surface,depthlessness, and simulation. If we accept that there is such a thing as film-infused literatureor filmic literature, might there not also be such a thing as filmic translation? Here, ChristopherLogue’s War Music (2001), freely translated from the Iliad or Norbert Hummelt’s Das öde Land(2008), the most recent German translation of The Waste Land (1922), serve as two suchexamples of translators deliberately drawing on cinematic images and techniques. For instance,Logue uses establishing shots followed by close ups to set particular scenes, thus structuring histranslation in accordance with filmic techniques. Both Logue and Hummelt also draw directly oncinematic images: Logue calling to mind gangster films, and Hummelt re-recording an auralmemory of an eighteenth-century song into a visual memory of a Hollywood film from 1990when he translates Eliot’s line “When lovely woman stoops to folly” into “Wenn Pretty Womansich getäuscht hat” (“When Pretty Woman has fooled herself”). [42] Similarly, filmic techniquesare at play in innovative digital translation-works, such as by the artist collective Young-HaeChang Heavy Industries that use the a!ordances of digital mediation to blur the lines betweenliterature and film. Using flashing techniques derived from film and film-related media (e.g.,photographic, tachistoscopic), their multilingual online translations make visible thetranslation process on the screen. [43]

In the context of this essay, however, the salient question is this: if literary translation, likeliterary writing, has adapted to film culture, in what ways did optical media mark literarytranslation during the period that defines the prehistory of cinema? A considerable body of workin art history, film and media history, and in nineteenth-century literary studies has suggestedthat the literary and fine arts were finely attuned to emergent projection, screen, and motionpicture technologies, which had become su"ciently culturally important to be appropriated by,and incorporated into, poetry, novels, and other aesthetic forms. [44] If optical media arediscernibly present (whether as theme, motif, or metaphor; as structuring technique; or asaesthetic principle) in a range of literary expressions and genres – such as novels by Dickens,plays by Strindberg, or poems by Tennyson – it would seem reasonable to assume that thiswould also be so in works of and on translation. [45] Resting on this assumption, therefore, thisessay explores the ways in which the magic lantern, especially in its phantasmagoria form,marks FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám both structurally andaesthetically. Here we should keep in mind Lynda Nead’s point that “art, magic and technology










overlapped continuously in this period.” [46] In pinpointing “the conceptual bond that broughtthese elements together”, namely, “the theme of metamorphosis – the possibility of visualtransformation, of the transmutation of inanimate objects into living flesh,” Nead foregroundsissues that should be treated as significant for understanding the relations between translationand mediality in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. [47]

Optical Unconscious

The magic lantern, with its parade of ghostly and shadowy figures, is a machine that producesapparitions and illusions. It is also a filter through which world, mind, and creativity isunderstood. When FitzGerald compares the lantern with the medium of the book, it is clear thatthe lantern creates little more than a short-lived and fleeting experience. Referring to a popularnovel by Benjamin Disraeli that is read out aloud to him – a phrase echoed in the opening lines ofT. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” – FitzGerald remarks:

Altogether the Book is like a pleasant Magic Lantern: when it is over, I shall forgetit: and shall want to return to what I do not forget, some of Thackeray’smonumental Figures “pauvre et triste Humanité,” as old Napoleon called it:Humanity in its Depths, not in its superficial Appearances. [48]

The passage makes explicit hierarchies between good and bad novels (a bad novel is assuperficial as the magic lantern spectacles) and between major and minor media (optical mediaare “light-weight” compared to the Leitmedium of the book); yet it also brings together mediaand memory. While the print medium is capable of imprinting itself on one’s memory, themagic lantern show merely leaves a hazy impression and is therefore as much about theforgettable as about forgetting. Optical media nevertheless do exert a hold on FitzGerald’s(optical) unconscious, as is clear from his writings elsewhere. [49]

In a manuscript note reprinted in Hallam Tennyson’s memoirs of his father, FitzGerald claimsto have recalled a recital of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” – a poem that itself is a“thesaurus of optical images” with “its own optical consciousness” – through the lens of anoptical device. [50] FitzGerald states:

Well I remember this poem, read to me, before I knew the author, at Cambridge onenight in 1832 or 3, and its images passing across my head, as across a magic mirror,while half asleep on the mail coach to London“in the creeping dawn” that followed.[51]

That “Fitzgerald was fascinated by optical technologies,” as Michael Nott points out, is evidentalso in other personal writings where memory of multiple incidents is described in similarlyproto-cinematic ways. [52] For instance, FitzGerald describes something he saw as “an almostobliterated Slide of the old Magic Lantern,” and elsewhere, he makes reference to LouisDaguerre (who found a way of capturing fleeting images from the camera obscura by fixingthem on glass) when he describes a memory he had as “all Daguerreotyped into the mind’s eyenow.” [53] That this “venerable Remembrancer,” as FitzGerald self-described, [54] in e!ectaccesses memory by way of optical media is grist for Kittler’s argument that the wax tablet












might have served Plato as a model for memory but has since “technically advanced andtransformed.” [55] Revising the point slightly, it is not that the lantern slide is technologicallysuperior to the wax slate; rather, magic lanterns are not dead media (the wax tablet is dead –although of course it is remediated and lives on in the magic writing pad, iPad, etc.) but vibrantand alive in the public and private life of FitzGerald and his contemporaries.

Thus, Josh March reminds us of the lantern’s ubiquity “from the 1860s to 1890s, when perhapstwelve hundred lantern lecturers criss-crossed the county by railway and lantern companiessplurged on studios, supplies and slide catalogues that were the size of bricks.” [56] Andstressing its cultural importance across Europe, Tom Gunning points to its multiple uses:

The lantern show was adapted to every possible task of entertainment andinstruction and adopted by a huge range of institutions and practices fromtravelling entertainments, to temperance lectures, to the promotion of bothreligion and science and the conveying of distant lands and current events tomasses of people. […] The magic lantern was the first medium to contest the printedword as a primary mode of information and instruction.” [57]

Perpetually modified and upgraded since its first appearance in the seventeenth century, themagic lantern is essentially a box that by means of a natural or artificial light source, refractedfrom a mirror through a magnifying lens, projects shadowy images onto a surface. Although itsmotion e!ects were merely a “sideshow to its key roles,” as Gunning is careful to point out, itscapacity for projection (making images appear suddenly, enlarge or retreat, and vanish) and itsfacility for dissolving views when used in tandem with another lantern (resolving one imageinto another perfectly orchestrated) are among the techniques that inspired earlycinematography. [58] They are also techniques that inspired literary imaginaries. FitzGerald’sRubáiyát is just one of many literary works to make direct reference to the magic lantern showand to evoke, though latently, its formal and aesthetic logic.

Lantern Aesthetics

Attributed to the eleventh-century Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet OmarKhayyám, the Rubáiyát is a collection of rubá’i or quatrains, each representing an independentpoetic unit. Their arrangement – not unlike the slide-show of the magic lantern – is “flexibleand recombinant in its design,” a structure therefore that “does not inherently resist revision bythe knitting of stanza to stanza.” [59] It is also a structure that lends itself to loose translationand retranslation. Of these Omarian quatrains, FitzGerald rendered some, but not all, in what iswidely regarded as a free translation; in his own words, translating “none literally,” and“generally mash[ing] up two – or more – into one.” [60] Much of his Rubáiyát is mediated fromPersian into English via the Latin version he produced first; and much of it he retranslatedobsessively between its initial publication in pamphlet form in 1859 and its fourth edition of1879. The pamphlet (which he self-financed and which appeared anonymously) failed to sell.Discovered by the Pre-Raphaelites, championed by Rossetti, parodied by T.S. Eliot, and admiredby Pound, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám remains one of the most popular, if academicallyneglected, works in the English language, available in a staggering number of di!erent editions.









For Adrian Poole the “secret of its appeal” is the “playful spirit,” in which the poem presents itsotherwise grim and fatalistic subject matter about the arbitrariness of life, shadowed by theinevitability of death. [61] This levity is evident in quatrain XXIX (1879):

Into this Universe, and Why not knowingNor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. [62]

The Rubáiyát’s metaphysical probing of life and death and of endings and beginnings makesmetamorphosis central not only to its themes and its recombinant structure, but also itsretranslations by FitzGerald (and others’ adaptations that live o! those retranslations). That isto say, the poem is about “the uncertain continuance of life after death” just as translation is;[63] after all, while in Benjaminian terms, translation constitutes for the original the possibilityof continued life, it is by no means certain how much of an original lives on in translation.[64] What translation and the magic lantern share is that both are media for animating the deador returning them to life.

The Rubáiyát not only “embrac[es] the inevitability of change” but “oblivion” too, as Erik Grayexplains: “the poem is so concerned with the transformation of dead selves – how everythingdies only to be reborn in di!erent shape. Every rose was once a king; every lost friend is nowgrass on which we sit; and we shall soon be grass for others.” [65] On the one hand, the poem iscyclical, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk. On the other, the perpetual cycle of life anddeath in Gray’s reading becomes, more appropriately, “an example of recycling” given the“constant changes that bodies undergo:” “the garden has a lap (XIX), the river has a lip (XX),and so does the earthen urn (XXXV), which is capable of speaking and kissing.” [66] DanielSchenker surrealistically suggests that “the Rubáiyát remains a veritable butcher shop ofdismembered flesh: eyes in the earth, runaway moving fingers, and organs of speech all over theplace.” [67]

The foci on, or “close-ups” as it were of, body parts like “The Moving Finger [that] writes; andhaving writ,/ Moves on” (LXXI, 1879) uncannily recall the lanternist trick of enlargement, whichHorace Walpole knew how to deploy so well in The Castle of Otranto (1764) with its numerousreferences to oversized limbs: a “giant” of a “hand,” a “gigantic leg and foot.” [68] Walpole’snovel not only initiated the Gothic genre, but it did so by drawing on the magic lantern traditionof the floating or disembodied head. Such heads (a famous example being the floating head ofBenjamin Franklin that magically transformed into a skull) appeared out of thin air, seemed toadvance by the trick of enlargement, and disappeared again “by seeming to sink into theground.” [69]

Similarly, the ever-changing focal perspectives that FitzGerald deploys in the Rubáiyát fromearth-bound (“Ground,” “Garden,” “Grass”) to skyward (“Heaven,” “Moon,” “Stars”) andback down, and back up again (“Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate/ I rose, andon the Throne of Saturn sate”), repeat the operations by which the magic lantern showdispenses with a stable, central perspective in favor of shifting and multiple perspectives (“theTulip […] from the soil looks up;” “The little Moon look’d in”). [70] But more than that, theperpetual transformations and dissolutions that Gray picks up on, I want to suggest, not only













intimate (coming back to Lynda Nead’s point) “the transmutation of inanimate objects intoliving flesh” (“Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn,” XXXV), but also “the possibility ofvisual transformation.” Put di!erently, I am suggesting that there is something distinctly“lanternist” about the succession and dissolution of images in this poem. What Herbert Tuckercalls the “rapid-fire delivery and ready solubility” of the poem’s metaphors, what AnnmarieDrury sees as the poem’s preference for “interruption and rapid metamorphosis overcontinuity,” whereby “one stanza typically o!ers little hint of what the next may contain,”giving instead “flickerings of inter-stanzaic pattern,” and what Nott describes as the poem’srestless serving up of images, “conjur[ing] sights that are dismissed, modified, refracted, orpostponed as rapidly as they are introduced,”are characteristics that are also visible in thetechniques of the lanternist, whose slide arrangements present viewers with a succession ofunconnected, although not unrelated, images. [71]

Indeed, Coleridge chastised Goethe’s poem Faust, ein Fragment (1790) on precisely suchgrounds, blaming its lack of cohesion on lanternist techniques: “there is no whole in the poem;the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures.” [72] That such techniques should also be operativein Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) is perhaps not surprising given that thepoem “evinces a complex parodic attitude to the Rubáiyát.” [73] Its fragmentary structure, whichLeonard Unger aptly describes as “a series of slides,” each containing an isolated image,seemingly draws on FitzGerald’s lanternist aesthetic. [74]

The point is that Eliot sees something in FitzGerald that remains obscure to FitzGerald scholars.Despite Tucker’s exploration of ekphrasis, or what he calls “autoekphrasis,” the poem’sdepiction for instance of “alternate Night and Day” (XVII, 1879), so readily applicable to themagic lantern’s alternations of dark and light displays, is not read through the prism of opticalmedia, but through another medium: as signs of “printed textuality,” with night signifying“[j]et ink” and day signifying “white paper.” [75] Similarly, the lines “We are no other than amoving row/ Of visionary Shapes that come and go” (LXXIII, 1879), which literally refer tolantern-projected phantoms (as we shall see below) are treated by Tucker as an “allegory ofreading” and interpreted as textual marks on the page: “alphabetic strings” activated by themotion of the eye during reading. [76] Equally suggestive as well as revealing is Drury’sdeployment of the term “flickering” in relation to the poem’s structure. Despite using a termthat is “the tell-tale signature of the lantern” and that captures accurately what is going on inthe poem, her insight reveals a blindness, as Paul de Man might have said, to the ways in whichoptical media are arguably operative in the poem. [77]

In his edition of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, Daniel Karlin suggests that FitzGerald makes manifestthe phenomenon of the “translator as editor,” basing his insight on FitzGerald’s unusualpractice of customizing his own library books, even paintings, literally, with scissors and glue.[78] Editing here is understood as both a hands-on cutting and pasting and a textual practice;editing also, however, belongs to screen practice, whereby separate images, one might say, are“most ingeniously tessellated” into a larger picture, or chain of pictures. [79] Arguably then,apart from undertaking interlingual translations from Persian via Latin into English, andintralingual translations from one edition to the next, FitzGerald furthers his “lanternism” bytranslating optical media into the medium of writing.












The World is a Lanthorn

In 1871 FitzGerald’s artist friend Edwin Edwards designed a frontispiece that was to be includedin the third edition of the book for the London bookseller Quaritch, but never was. It depicts alantern “held out by a truncated arm” (Figure 1). [80]

Fig. 1.

According to G.S. Layard, whose 1902 essay prints for the first time this etching, it is “a verydi!erent thing from a mere translation of the words into pictorial form. It is far more than this.It is an illuminator of the meaning, and accentuates its spiritual significance.” [81] But so too istranslation an illuminator of meaning. Here, I want to set the scene by way of an analysis of theshifting meanings of the quatrain to which the illustration above refers, in retranslations of it,including FitzGerald’s own.


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For in and out, above, about, below,‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,Round which we Phantom Figures come and go. (1859, XLVI)

In this quatrain the world presents itself as a “Magic Shadow-show,” lit by the sun, and itsplayers are mere shadows that “come and go” without meaningful volition. But what is thenature of this “Magic Shadow-show?” FitzGerald describes Omar’s lantern in his notes asfollows: “Fánúsi khiyál, a ‘Magic-lanthorn’ still used in India; the cylindrical Interior beingpainted with various Figures, and so lightly poised and ventilated as to revolve round the lightedCandle within.” [82] The heat that causes the lantern to rotate projects the painted figures asshadows onto the walls, making them traverse around the room. Such lanterns are stillcommonplace today as optical toys in children’s bedrooms. While Victorians would in alllikelihood have associated the “Magic Shadow-shapes” with magic lantern shows, a writer inthe Magic Lantern Gazette is quick to point out that FitzGerald “did not put words in Old Omar’smouth. (At least not in this instance.) Because, of course, Omar would have known of movingfigures not only in puppet shadows but also in the shadow shows of those early Persian times.”[83]

A host of translators, including John Payne, translator of The Book of the Thousand Nights andOne Night (1882-4) and contemporary of FitzGerald’s, opted for the medium of the “Chinese-lantern.” [84] The Chinese shadow play is one of the oldest known forms of entertainment of thiskind, which uses backlit screens for projecting cut-out puppets on sticks or string; this suggestsa world where humans are insubstantial shadows and the objects of a puppeteer’s manipulation.Equally, the quatrain might be taken to refer to Plato’s simile of the cave, where the shadowtheatre’s created illusions spellbind their viewers to the extent that they prefer the falsepleasures of the simulations to reality’s o!erings outside the cave. While in Plato’s parable thereexists a world outside the cave, there is no outside for Payne (or FitzGerald): “the world is thelantern.” [85] Since FitzGerald makes reference to a shadow-show played in a “Box,” it mightmore readily therefore allude either to the camera obscura (a “dark chamber” with a smallaperture through which light passes, receiving “live” and life-like pictures from the outside to beprojected on a surface inside); the peep-show (generally speaking, a portable box with aneyehole through which a miniature scene can be seen, with a mechanism for changing sceneryto form a continuous story and accompanied by an aural narrative given by a showman); or themagic lantern (a box made of wood, copper or other materials using images from lantern slidesthat are either hand-painted, colored picture transfers, or photographic prints on glass and thatare projected from inside the lantern outwards). All three of these “boxes” have taken variousforms over the centuries, and each tends to be associated with di!erent ways of seeing andunderstanding the world.

From Lantern to Flickergraph

We should keep in mind here that there were countless such optical devices and hosts ofdi!erent kinds of magic lanterns, including hybrid lanterns, and that each device depends for itsdefinition on mechanism, context, use, and geography. Apart from conflicting accounts andinterpretations of which contraption emerged when, what complicates matters further is that







there was little consistency in nomenclature as well as frequent misnaming. The magic lantern’schange in nomenclature to “stereopticon” in American English after the 1850s is just one suchexample; [86] as are conflations of camera obscura shows with lantern shows by contemporaries.[87] The di"culty therefore of how to translate Fánúsi khiyál and the multiplicity of formats itmight refer to – an Indian lantern, resembling an old Persian one, or a Chinese lantern – isindicative of the di"culty of translation itself. That translation should be understood asinterlingual and intercultural transfer and crucially also as intralingual and intermedial transferis borne out by the following retranslations.

We are no other than a moving rowOf Magic Shadow-shapes that come and goRound with the Sun-illumin’d Lantern heldIn Midnight by the Master of the Show; (1879, LXVIII) [88]

FitzGerald’s reworked quatrain from 1879 now makes explicit reference to a “Lantern,” as if togive some clarity as to the nature of the box. However, in circumscribing one box it opens upanother, that is, it opens up the possibility that the world that is the lantern is a phantasmagoriashow. In such shows, magic lanterns were used to animate or breathe pneuma into ghosts andother phantoms in eerie spectacles of the lifeless alive. These phantoms appear and disappear,or “come and go,” out of the darkness and back into it. The reference to the “Lantern” alongsidethe “Magic Shadow-shapes” conjures up the phantasmagoria, a connection all the moretangible since the darkness engulfing the show, suggested by “Midnight,” is a definingcharacteristic of these shows, plunging their audience into utter darkness before the showstarts. Even the phantasmagoria lanternist (and unlike the lanternist of the magic shadow-show) – represented here by the newly introduced “Master of the Show” – would work “behindthe screen, in total darkness, hidden from the audience, with ‘pseudonecromantic’ e!ect.” [89]

When Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs opt, in their 1981 translation of the same quatrain, forthe media technology of the “diorama” (“Let us consider this wheel of heaven that amazes us,/As if it were a diorama.”), [90] they are not introducing “an unwanted modernism,” [91] but anarchaism that calls to mind another popular entertainment of Victorian visual culture thatbelongs to the pre-history of cinema. Robert Graves and Omar Ali Shah’s translation from 1967does the opposite by deliberately evoking cinema when they make the world into “a widescreen/ For countless lie-rehearsing silhouettes.” [92] Theirs is not just a displacement orupdating of one media technology by another, but an implicit acknowledgement of the magiclantern as an important precursor of cinema and the active historicity of media transitions incultural forms. Another reworking of FitzGerald’s lantern-quatrain that features a translationfrom one optical device into another, and that seems to have been overlooked by FitzGeraldscholars, is the cinépoem “Rubaiyat of the Flickergraph” (1910) by the Australian writerHarrison Owen. Translation is at the very heart of this poem, doubly so: not only does the magiclantern show become a cinema, but “cinema” itself is translated intralingually into“flickergraph,” a term that was “in fairly regular use in Australasia from around 1904.” [93] Thepoem also includes a reworking of both the 1859 quatrain and its retranslation of 1879. Here,Owen alludes to FitzGerald’s 1859 quatrain:

This life of ours, about, above, below.Is nothing but a flickergraphic show!Into this theatre called the Universe











We come, and out of it again we go!

In another quatrain, Owen transforms Fitzgerald’s “Master of the Show” from the 1879 editioninto “the weary operator [that] turns the wheel,/ Winds o! the film, and then – stops themachine!”

With the newly introduced “Master of the Show,” FitzGerald amplifies the fatalistic message ofthe poem, painting a world that emphasizes not only the transience of existence, but itsdependence on this “Master.” The dependency at issue is twofold: on the one hand, the masteryof illusion, like Bishop Berkeley’s God, guarantees the persistence of impermanently appearingshades, [94] and as such conjures up the magic lantern’s visual e!ects. On the other, thedependency of the creature on the technological environment – the magic lantern – he or sheinhabits, e!ectively short-circuits any claim to free will. Not unlike Edwards’ etching, whichgives a glimpse of this hidden master of the show, the 1879 quatrain’s inclusion of this figuresuggests that human agency is diminished and that we are subject to chance and fate – nothingmore than conscious automata. The quatrain’s worldview chimes, it would appear, withFitzGerald’s own. According to Drury, the underlying aesthetic that guides FitzGerald’s poeticand translational practice owes something to his belief in a “world governed by chance.” [95] Itis not just in his letters, but also in the Rubáiyát itself, Drury writes, that FitzGerald“[r]epeatedly and almost superstitiously […] invokes the power of chance and accident, whichhe believed enabled him to recreate the voice of a medieval Persian poet he admired.” [96] Thissupposed recreation of Omar’s voice is crucial in terms of understanding FitzGerald’s lantern-inflected vision of translation.

Translation and Spirit-Channeling

John Dryden famously said that in translation “the spirit of an author may be transfused, andyet not lost,” thus drawing on the Pythagorean notion of the migration of soul. [97] FitzGeraldmakes this belief his own by proposing that translation is “transmogrification.” [98] As he putsit in 1859:

I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have:though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must live: with atransfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Original’s better. Better alive Sparrow than a stu!ed Eagle. [99]

Ezra Pound also sees his “job” as a translator “to bring a dead man to life, to present a livingfigure.” [100] At the basis of such statements is the magical belief in transubstantiation: a deadman lives once more, a “Thing” is re-animated, a dead eagle’s spirit passes into anotheranimal, a living sparrow. FitzGerald reiterates the point elsewhere, echoing Ecclesiastes 9.4,when he writes that the “live Dog [is] better than the dead Lion.” [101] Here, the magic lanternwith its conjuring tricks comes into view once more. Not only did its spectacles raise the dead,but its transformation scenes turned heads into skulls and its dissolving views, as if by magic,transformed days into nights, calm seas into stormy ones, men into women, or a pile ofsausages into a small dog, as John Henry Pepper famously did in the 1870s for hisMetempsychosis show at the Royal Polytechnic in London. [102] Just as, according to Isobel












Armstrong, the lantern’s dissolving view “performs a state of ‘becoming’” that involves “botharising and passing away,” so, as it were, do FitzGerald’s animal dissolves. [103] For FitzGerald,transmigration does not ascend to a higher form of life, but moves base-ward from the noble,from eagle to sparrow and lion to dog. Perhaps because of a “lack of belief in his own creative,originative power,” FitzGerald lets himself serve as the medium through which the spirit ofOmar speaks. [104] According to Marina Warner, “[t]his way of writing is a form of channeling,”and for Jorge Luis Borges it is a miracle of reincarnation. [105] Borges, whose father hadproduced his own translation of the Omar-Fitzgerald Rubáiyát, goes as far as to speculate:“perhaps, around 1857, Omar’s soul took up residence in FitzGerald’s.” [106] On such a reading,translation is metempsychosis – wittily encapsulated in FitzGerald’s reference to himself as“Edward FitzOmar.” [107]

That Rossetti – who had been FitzGerald’s champion and part of the group of poets who hadrescued the 1859 Rubáiyát from oblivion – changed his name from Gabriel Charles DanteRossetti to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, while translating Dante, suggests that translation is a specialcircumstance of channeling the spirits of the dead. But there is another aspect that remains to bedrawn out here as regards the “redelivery of poetic inspiration.” [108] What Fitzgerald, Rossettiand Pound share is a sense that translation is possession by non-human forces. This comesacross most prominently in Rossetti’s analogy of the translator with Aladdin, whose search for amagic lamp brings him into contact with the djinni inside the lamp.

His path is like that of Aladdin through the enchanted vaults: many are the preciousfruits and flowers which he must pass by unheeded in search for the lamp alone;happy if at last, when brought to light, it does not prove that his old lamp has beenexchanged for a new one, – glittering indeed to the eye, but scarcely of the samevirtue nor with the same genius at its summons. [109]

Although Rossetti does not spell out the importance of the genie, it is implied by this commentelsewhere in the preface to The Early Italian Poets (1861): “if only [the translator’s] will belongedto him.” [110] Since this statement is preceded by a reference to the translator’s supposed“humility” and “self-denial,” Susan Bassnett reads it in terms of Rossetti’s “repression of hisown creative impulses,” [111] with the translator’s task reduced “to serve, and hence remaininvisible.” [112] If, however, we read Rossetti’s theory of translation in proximity to FitzGerald’schanneling of souls, then the apparent denial of agency is nothing other a precondition forpossession through spell or enchantment.

The invocation of the lamp suggests that the translator, like Aladdin, unleashes the genie,imprisoned in the lamp. It is true, of course, that the relation between owner of the lamp andgenie is a master-slave dialectic since the genie answers only to its master; if, however, we takethe genie as the creative power on which its master – original poet or translator – relies to givelife to his creation, on such a reading, it is creative genius itself that waits to be awakened.Creative impulses are not repressed but released, putting translation on a par with originalpoetry. The poet-translator, thus conceived, does not exchange an old lamp (original) for a newone (translation) but sees the lamp for what it is: a magic lamp and a medium for storingcreative impulses, liberated or vivified by acts of magic. In such a schema there is no hierarchybetween original and translation; hence, the order of priority is only local, i.e. between twoderivatives, rather than absolute, with the original at its head.













This conception of creativity taps into age-old notions of what art is. For Plato, for example,according to an “ancient story,” art is imitation or possession. [113] In Rossetti’s case, Aladdin’slamp is therefore inimitable not by virtue of some peculiarity of the lamp but rather by “virtue”of the virtu (power) it contains. The imitation of the lamp, or of its first fruits (or source text),would therefore be a counterfeit, however shiny, merely standing in for what it imitates. Hencethe hope that the lamp we must seek out has not been replaced by some shiny or flash copy. Thelamp then is a (technology and a) medium, contact with which produces poetic power throughthe possession of its “Aladdin” (frotteur) by that lamp’s resident genius (demon). Genius here isnot cleverness but jinni, djinni or genie, i.e. demon. Ergo, authentic art is demonic and authentictranslation is the product of possession not imitation. J. J. McGann is surely right to say thatRossetti’s translation endeavors “are much closer to ritual acts of magic than they are toRomantic acts of self-expression,” – after all, he calls back from the dead the power of theoriginal poet, “resurrects, as it were, the vital life of the original poetry.” [114] The same is surelyalso true of FitzGerald. Why else would he state that he could “feel with” Omar Khayyám, that is,that he shares a spiritual a"nity with him? [115] In this context it is worth noting that theVictorians were obsessed with resurrection, whether this took the form of séances, spirit-drawings and spirit-photography, medieval revivalism, grave robbing and mummy disrobing,or the necromantic spectacles of the phantasmagoria. That this Zeitgeist should rub o! ontranslation theory and practice is not surprising.

To conceive of translation as spirit-channeling is to conceive of it as something “mediumistic.”However, insofar as there exists, as Je!rey Sconce argues, an “explicit intersection oftechnology and spirituality, of media and ‘mediums’,” the mediumistic also intersects with themedial. [116] This is precisely the case with Rossetti’s magic lamp; it is also the case with themagic lantern insofar as it provides the model for thinking about translation in mediumisticterms. The phantasmagoria, especially, summons the ghosts of the dead and thus creates theillusion, like the séance, that the barrier between the living and the dead is permeable andmanipulable. Take, for instance, the following description by David Brewster, inventor ofvarious optical media, of a 1802 phantasmagoria (and the “transmutation” spectacles) stagedby the great showman M. Philipstal: “figures which retired with the freshness of life came backin the form of skeletons, and the retiring skeletons returned in the drapery of flesh and blood.”[117] If FitzGerald believed it possible to make contact with the spirit of Omar, to turn a dead poetinto a living figure, it is a belief that has its source not only in spiritualism, but in the mediaprinciple of the phantasmagoria, since it intimated “that contact can be made with the psyche,the dead, or artificial life forms.” [118] In other words, translation as spirit-channeling in thenineteenth century is remediated by the phantasmagoria and the magic lantern, that is,modeled after it and enabled by it.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the connection between the works of spirit (Geist) and working with spirits(Geister) consists in their technological mediation. In consequence, it is technological mediation,and therefore media, that determine our situation or, more pertinently, the situation of spirit asmanifest in the world. That is, the shapes of spirit are recorded in their mediology: written,painted, drawn, projected, etc. Translation must therefore also record and transpose theoperations of spirit; it is a recording of cultural processes. Yet, as a form of spirit-channeling,









translation will also be shaped by the media technologies that make it possible. Translation isaccordingly not a matter of capturing, or failing to capture, the “spirit” of the original; rather,translation – like writing and thinking more generally – is inseparable from a “mediology ofspirit.” It is this inseparability of the particular media technologies that determine spirit’ssituation, which entail that FitzGerald’s translation practice bears the traces of what I havecalled a lanternist aesthetics. This is also why his translation theory of spirit-channeling is atonce thoroughly technological and bears the marks of a nineteenth-century spiritualism thatitself is inextricable from the shadows cast by contemporaneous projection, broadcast, andcommunications technologies.

There remains one further aspect we should draw out here. The magic lamp that Rossetti uses inrelation to translation is deeply embedded in a nineteenth-century Zeitgeist that takes seriouslythe idea that acts of translational rendering involve non-human entities that haunt the living.Similarly, it is clear that for FitzGerald, translation is a phantasmagoric channeling of the spiritsof the dead. These very ideas live on in Pound’s theory and practice of translation, for whom theentire “process of art” in fact appears to be a “sort of divine phantasmagoria” in which, he says,“we are “half-media & half creators.” [119] The idea that translation is possession, either by asupernatural entity such as a genie or a ghost, I want to suggest, is a form of non-humantranslation that foreshadows another kind of “possession,” one with which we are only toofamiliar in the context of our own media environment: non-human translation by machines.Here too, non-human entities take over the machinations of translation. This is what isexplored in the many “translation art” experiments by contemporary avant-garde poet-translators, such as for instance Hsia Yü or Mark Amerika, who use automated translation andautomatic writing for a new poetical aesthetic that bypasses and thus undermines the consciousagency of the translator. In this sense machine translation is the exorcism of spirit (Geist) whilemarking another stage, therefore, in spirit’s own mediological odyssey. [120] This essay gave amere snapshot of what is a much longer history of machining translation to show that even aquaint poem like Rubáiyát by an amateur gentlemanly translator is already machined.

1. N. Katharine Hayles, “Translating Media: Why we should rethink Textuality,” The Yale Journal ofCriticism 16.2 (2003): 282. ↩

2. Peter Hinds, “The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of theEighteenth-Century Novel, ed. J. A. Downie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7; John Feather, AHistory of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), 150. ↩

3. See Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York:Columbia University press, 2015). ↩

4. Nox translates Catullus’s poem 101 and presents the original and her translated fragments in a bookwhose overtly digital surface so incorporates analog sources (crumbled pages, handwritten and typednotes, and Xeroxed and pages) and pre-print forms (scroll, codex) as to make the overall result “un-Kindle-isable” as Carson puts it. See Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, “Re-vision as Remediation:Hypermediacy and Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Image and Narrative 14.4 (2013) 20-33. For animage of the book, see <http://accordionpublications.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/anne-carson-nox-new-directions-new-york.html>. ↩

5. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999);McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 15-16. ↩

6. Examples include John Cayley’s digital translation-poems, such as “translation 5.5” or RiverIsland; or



http://amodern.net/article/translation-optical-media/#rf1-11358



http://accordionpublications.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/anne-carson-nox-new-directions-new-york.html





conversely in print form, machine-translation experiments such as Mark Amerika’s Locus Solus (2014),a cut-and-paste remix of the proto-surrealist novel by Raymond Roussel of the same name. ↩

7. See, for example, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics ofTransition, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). ↩

8. See Anton Kaes, “Literary Intellectuals and the Cinema: Charting a Controversy (1909-1929),” NewGerman Critique 40 (Winter, 1987): 7–34. ↩

9. For instance, Bobby Carlton Brown’s reading machine proposed in 1930, which would enable literatureto be absorbed more quickly. ↩

10. David Seed, ed., Literature and the Visual Media (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005); Julian Murphet and LydiaRainford, eds., Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing after Cinema (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,2003). ↩

11. Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 35. ↩12. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1925), 405-579; John

Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 104; Thomasde Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2013), 135. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding. AbridgedEdition, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),145. ↩

13. Immanuel Kant quoted by Stefan Andriopoulus, Ghostly Apparitions. German Idealism, the Gothic Novel,and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 11; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will andRepresentation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 153; C. H. Butterworth,“Overfeeding,” Victoria Magazine 14 (November to April 1870): 501; William Butler Yeats quoted by TerryCastle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry15 (Autumn 1988): 48. ↩

14. Theodore Sturgeon, “Baby is Three,” Galaxy Science Fiction 5.1 (October 1952): 17. ↩15. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works

of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 5, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 536; Lou Andreas-Salomé quoted by Stephen Heath, “Cinema and Pychoanalysis: Parallel Histories,” in Endless Nights, ed.Janet Bergstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 26; Sherry Turkle, The Life on theScreen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 9. ↩

16. Theo Hermans, “Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation,” in Manipulationof Literature, ed. Hermans (London: Crook Helm, 1985), 103-135. ↩

17. George Steiner, afterword to After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 471. ↩18. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, eds. Translation, History, and Culture (London: Pinter, 1990), xi. ↩19. Norman Shapiro quoted by Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation (London:

Routledge, 1995), 1. ↩20. Sir Edward Sherburne (1701) quoted by T. R. Steiner, English Translation Theory 1650-1800

(Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), 35. ↩21. Anonymous review (1792) quoted by Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 74. ↩22. Stephen Barrett (1759) quoted by T. R. Steiner, English Translation Theory, 38. ↩23. John Stuart Blackie (1861) quoted by Susanne Stark, “Behind Inverted Commas:” Translation and Anglo-

German Cultural Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999), 84. ↩24. Ezra Pound quoted by Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 187. ↩25. Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6, see especially

Part IV. ↩26. John Florio (1603), Joost van den Vodel (1660) quoted by Hermans, “Metaphor,” 115. ↩27. See J. B. Bullen, “Raising the Dead: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Willowwood’ Sonnets”, in The Oxford

Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. by Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 429-444 (432-3). ↩

28. This term is used by Cecil Day Lewis, On Translating Poetry. The Second Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture(Abingdon: The Abbey Press, 1970), 22. ↩


























29. Rossetti, preface to The Early Italian Poets. From Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante (London: Smith, Elder and Co,1861), x. ↩

30. FitzGerald, “Letter to Cowell,” in The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, Volume 2: 1851-1866, ed. AlfredMcKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980),335; Pound, “To A. R. Orage,” Selected Letters: 1907-1941 of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Page (New York: NewDirections, 1971), 149. ↩

31. Michael Emmerich, “Translation, Ghosts and Metaphors”, In Translation: Translators on Their Work andWhat It Means, ed. Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 50;Douglas Robinson, Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason (New York: State University ofNew Press, 2001), 82. For a brief history of divine inspiration as well as a post-rational account of spirit-channeling, see Robinson’s fascinating book. ↩

32. On the link between media and mediums, see Je!rey Sconce, Haunted Media. Electronic Presence fromTelegraphy to Television (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000). ↩

33. Newman cited by Stark,“Behind Inverted Commas,” 78. ↩34. Newman, “The Unlearned Public is the Righted Judge of Taste” (1861), Western Translation Theories, ed.

Douglas Robinson (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997) 256-258 (256). ↩35. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of The Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 172. ↩36. Nietzsche, “An Heinrich Köselitz in Venedig,” in Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. III.1: Briefe

von Nietzsche: 1880–1884, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981),172. ↩

37. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. William Lovitt(New York and London: Harper Colophon, 1977). ↩

38. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. Geo!rey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix. ↩

39. “First Steps towards a Media History of Translation,” Translation Studies 4.3 (2011): 261-281. ↩40. Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 14.2-3 (2004):

76, 107. ↩41. See David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). ↩42. I have addressed this in “‘In the Beginning’… an Intermedial Babel,” SubStance 44.3 (2015): 112-127; see

also Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation, 220-234. ↩43. See Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 78-100. ↩44. Notably, Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery. Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2007); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000); Helen Groth, Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). ↩

45. See Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003);Walter Baumgarten and Thomas Fechner-Smarsly, eds., August Strindberg. Der Dichter und die Medien(München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003); Isobel Armstrong, “‘The Lady of Shalott:’ Optical Elegy,” inMultimedia Histories. From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett (Exeter:The University of Exeter Press, 2007), 179-193. ↩

46. Nead, Haunted Gallery, 85. ↩47. Nead, Haunted Gallery, 88. ↩48. Edward FitzGerald, “Letter to Anna Biddell,” Letters, Volume 3: 1867-1876, 328 (emphasis added). ↩49. Walter Benjamin uses “optical unconscious” to describe how photography mediates experience and

structures perception, see “Little History of Photography”, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2,Part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and GarySmith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 510-12. ↩

50. Armstrong, “Optical Elegy,” 179. ↩51. Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir. Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2012), 116. ↩52. Nott, and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Victorian Studies 58, 4 (2016): 662. ↩



























53. FitzGerald quoted by Nott,“Photopoetry,” 662. ↩54. “Letter to E. B. Cowell,” Letters 4: 1877-1883, 343. ↩55. Kittler, Optical Media, 35. ↩56. Marsh, “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views:’ The Magic Lantern, Visual Story-telling and the Victorian

Technological Imagination,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Je!rey Geiger and Karin Littau(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 21. ↩

57. Gunning, introduction to Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of Cinema,trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), xxvii. ↩

58. Gunning, introduction, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, xxvii. ↩59. Christopher Decker, introduction to Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, ed.

Decker (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997), xxxii. For a detailed account of thepoem’s authorship and transmission history, see this introduction. ↩

60. FitzGerald quoted by Decker, introduction, xxxvii. ↩61. Poole, introduction to FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Popularity and Neglect, ed. Poole et al.

(London: Anthem Press, 2011), xxi. ↩62. Throughout this essay I refer to the critical edition by Decker. ↩63. Reynolds, Poetry of Translation, 269. ↩64. Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn

(London: Fontana, 1973), 73. ↩65. Gray, “Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Studies in English Literature 41.4 (2001): 771, 775. ↩66. Gray, “Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” 776. The references are to the 1879 edition. ↩67. Schenker, “Fugitive Articulation: An Introduction to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” Victorian Poetry 19.1

(1981): 57. ↩68. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37, 102. ↩69. See Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” 38, for an eyewitness account of Paul de Philipstal phantasmagoria show

of 1802; see also Groth, Moving Images, 139. ↩70. See FitzGerald, Rubáiyát,IV, V, CI, XLIV, XC, I and XXXI (1879). ↩71. Tucker, “Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Victorian Poetry 46.1

(2008): 71; Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2015), 155, 157; Nott, “Photopoetry,” 662. ↩

72. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “February 16. 1833,” in Specimens of the Table Talk (London: John Murray,1836), 197. ↩

73. See Drury, who draws on Vinnie-Marie D’Ambrosio’s argument, “‘Some for the Glories of the Sole’: theRubáiyát and Fitzgerald’s Sceptical American Parodists,” in Popularity and Neglect, ed. Poole et al., 194. ↩

74. Leonard Unger, T. S. Eliot. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 8 (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 22. ↩

75. Tucker, “Autoekphrasis,” 79. ↩76. Tucker, “Autoekphrasis,” 80. ↩77. Paul Carpenter, “Mimesis, Memory, and the Magic Lantern: What Did the Knock Witnesses See?” New

Hibernia Review 15. 2 (2011): 105-6. ↩78. Karlin, introduction to Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Karlin (Oxford World’s

Classics, 2009), xxxviii-xxxix. ↩79. FitzGerald uses this term to describe his translational practice, see “Letter to Cowell, Letters, Volume 2:

1851-1866, 323, see also 294. ↩80. G. S. Layard, “On Omar Khayyam Curiosity,” Bookman No. 127, Vol. XXII (April 1902): 15. ↩81. Layard, “On Omar Khayyam Curiosity,” 15. ↩82. Decker, Critical Edition, 113. ↩83. “The Tentmaker’s Lamp,” Magic Lantern Gazette 5.3 (1993): 5. ↩84. Quatrain 545, The Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nishapour (London: Villon Society, 1898), 134. ↩85. Quatrain 545, The Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nishapour, 134. ↩




































86. David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace (New York: Columbia University press, 1996), 1. ↩87. Koen Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660-1700): on Analogical Demonstration and the

Visualization of the Invisible,” The British Journal for the History of Science 38.2 (2005): 129-30. ↩88. Decker, Critical Edition, 105. It should also be noted that in the 1868 edition FitzGerald opts for

“visionary Shapes” (LXXIII) rather than “Magic Shadow-shapes.” ↩89. Marsh, “Dissolving Views,” 23. ↩90. No. 105, The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Penguin, 1981). ↩91. Stephen R. Wilk, How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap: Odd Excursions into Optics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 107.

Wilk’s account of FitzGerald’s quatrain in relation to media history is illuminating, although I do notfind myself in agreement with his conclusions. ↩

92. No. 72, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam: A New Translation with Critical Commentaries (London: Cassell,1967). ↩

93. For editor’s comment and poem, see Special Issue on The First Film Fiction, ed. Richard Koszarski andStephen Bottomore, in Film History 24.4 (2012): 460. ↩

94. Bishop George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge , in BerkeleyPhilosophical Writings, ed. D. M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §§ 146-7. ↩

95. Drury, Translation as Transformation, 160. ↩96. Drury, Translation as Transformation, 160. ↩97. “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles,” Western Translation Theories, 173. ↩98. FitzGerald cited by Michael Kerney, preface to Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (New York: Doxey, 1900), 22. ↩99. “Letter to E. B. Cowell,” Letters, Volume 2: 1851-1866, 335. ↩

100. Pound,“To A. R. Orage,” 149. ↩101. “Letter to J. R. Lowell,” Letters, Volume 4: 1877-1883, 167-8. ↩102. Henry Pepper, The True History of the Ghost; and All about Metempsychosis (London: Cassell & Campany,

1890). ↩103. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008), 296. ↩104. Karlin, introduction to Rubáiyát, xxxviii. ↩105. Warner, “Ventriloquism,” London Review of Books, 9 April 2009, 13-14. ↩106. J.L. Borges, “The Enigmas of Edward FitzGerald,” Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York:

Viking, 1999), 368. ↩107. “Letter to Bernard Quaritch,” Letters, Volume 3: 1867-1876, 232. ↩108. This is how Charles Eliot Norton described FitzGerald’s translation achievement in North American

Review (1869), reprinted in Karlin, Rubáiyát, 98-104 (103). ↩109. Rossetti, preface, x. ↩110. Rossetti, preface, ix. ↩111. Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2002, 3rd edition), 14. ↩112. Bassnett and Peter France, “Translation, Politics, and the Law”, in The Oxford History of Literary

Translation in English: Volume 4: 1790-1900, ed. Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006), 48-58 (52). ↩

113. Plato’s Laws 719c. For imitation, see Republic X; for possession, see Phaedrus and Ion. ↩114. J. J. McGann, “A Commentary on Some of Rossetti’s Translations from Dante”, in Haunted Texts: Studies

in Pre-Raphaelitism in Honour of William E. Fredeman, ed. by David Latham (Toronto: Toronto UniversityPress, 2003), 35-52 (37, 38). ↩

115. “Letter to E. B. Cowell,” Letters, Volume 2: 1851-1866, 305. ↩116. Sconce, Haunted Media, 25. ↩117. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1834), 81. ↩118. Oliver Grau, “Remember the Phantasmagoria! Illusion Politics of the Eighteenth Century and its

Multimedial Afterlife,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Grau (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007), 154. ↩




































119. “Letter to Dorothy Shakespear,” in Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1909-1914, ed. OmarPound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), 76. ↩

120. Kittler, introduction to Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Kittler (Paderborn:Ferdinand Schöningh, 1980), 7-14. ↩

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